Recent violent incidents in the country indicate a growing intolerance towards those whom we disagree with, as well as an unwillingness of politicians to defend the rights of people to speak and live as they wish. In this article, Abhijit Banerjee, Professor of Economics at MIT, contends that this is not just a Hindu problem or that of religion. There is a need for the political culture to imbibe our long intellectual tradition of liberal thought.
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A key factor that drives segmentation in societies is group identities along various dimensions. This column seeks to understand the effects of identity on individual behaviour. Based on an artefactual field experiment on Hindus and Muslims in India and Bangladesh, it finds that it is minority/ majority status based on religion, rather than religion in itself, that dictates trust behaviour of individuals.
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